Rapid development of information and communication systems in recent years has increased demand for quality improvement of software products and for efficiency in software development. As more efforts are directed to meeting such demands, employing software-design aid devices is increasing. In general, advantages for use of software-design aiding devices include facilitating standardization through an exclusion of individuality by providing standard formats, template figure components, and the like.
Moreover, effective management is an important objective for project managers, wherein choosing an appropriate development lifecycle process for the software project becomes crucial. For example, all other activities in software development can be derived from such lifecycle process. At the same time, continuously changing design or specification requirements of the development cycle poses difficulties and major problems. A great number of software applications fail to meet user requirements, and hence result in unacceptable maintenance costs, due to such changes.
Typically, for modern software development projects, gathering and agreeing on design requirements is fundamental to a successful project. Such does not necessarily imply that all requirements need to be fixed before any architecture, design, and coding is done—yet it is important for the development team to understand what needs to be built. Accordingly, clear communications between various team members become essential for the development team to realize the desired outcome, and proper basis for the specifications and requirements.
The cyclical interaction among team members for developing a computer software product can become a complex process that requires significant expenditure of time on part of various contributing teams. For example, software products are increasingly being developed by a plurality of teams working concurrently, and these teams are often distributed between different locations and organizations. Such teams can include project management, software development team (developer), and documentation team that work concurrently on the design of a product. In practice, the division of tasks and activities is carried out by generating documents/items that need to be timely shared among the various team members at various stages of software development.
Such items can include a specification, a product and associated documentation and help files that accompany the product. Nonetheless, maintaining synchronization among such entities has proven to be a demanding and complex task. For example, due to cyclical nature of software projects, maintaining synchronization among the project management team, the development team and the documentation team can typically become a futile exercise. Often the specification and the documentation are updated to synchronize with the product, only after the product has been developed—and not during product development.
In particular, during development it is difficult to identify what is the proper version of the specification and/or product requirement that should drive the design process. Accordingly, the teams involved can squander resources to determine a proper documentation state for a project and/or product. Without a proper and unique source for product/documentation identification, confusion and misunderstandings occur that can lead to lost productivity, and poor customer experience.